


Of Shadow, Bone, and Lost Names

by scorpiontales



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Mild Gore, Monsters, References to Suicide, but no actual suicide making that clear, molly centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 15:03:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiontales/pseuds/scorpiontales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly. It was so…unimpressive. <br/>Nothing was better for a monster hiding in plain sight.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Monster!Molly AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Shadow, Bone, and Lost Names

**Author's Note:**

> There is something that could be seen as suicide in here so I'm putting that as a warning just in case. But it isn't. I promise. I just want to stay on the safe side.

She was born out of ash and shadow.

Not that she remembered it. Her years upon years of memories mixed together like that, a blend of black and white photos long bleached clean by the sun. Some day’s she got snippets of her past that she had long forgotten;  lighting a match while a baby cried, the hushed whisper of a boy, the feeling of blood soaking into her hair. She wondered if those were some of her first memories, the ones she got when she was first made, wondering around the Earth like a wraith.

Sometimes she dreamed they were of times she was human. _If_ she was human. 

They mixed together for other reasons too. Years of blood, strangled cries and darkness tended to become one after so long. One could only experience so much destruction before they become immune to it. Faces became mere shadows. Words nothing but an echo.

She couldn’t remember a whole year clearly ever since she started playing the human game. She wondered if that means something or if the years hadn’t started to drag yet.

She called it quits sometime after the Black Plague. Her kind was gone, lost to the ages of fairy tales and fables, feeding in the dark was becoming harder and harder, and most of all it was boring. She was tired of hearing the screams from her victims, and even after she had stopped eating fresh prey, the dead corpses provided no excitement. She was a shadow to London, a simple illusion. The buried statue of Ozymandias, nothing but whispers to carry her legacy.

 

So she snapped on a pair of gloves. Started by becoming an undertaker. Forged a doctor’s certificate. Began taking bodies to be examined only to eat them in the night. Eventually, she began to purchase a place to live, began to know others by name, and had to get one of her own. She changed the surname every time she had to shift her appearance, but she had never changed the first one.

Molly. It was so…unimpressive.

Nothing was better for a monster hiding in plain sight.

 

 

***

Molly Hooper was born when Molly Smith’s coworkers started wondering why a fifty year old woman can look so young. So Molly Smith vanished, spent a couple hours at the local library looking up pictures of random woman, wrote down some basic traits and shed her skin. Molly Smith would become a cold case, filed away in piles of lost persons. Molly Hooper would burn the file a day into her new job, almost catching her new locks on fire. She wasn’t used to long hair.

Though she had to admit; it looked good on her.

 

 

***

 

 

Her life continued as normal. She avoided open flames (the one thing that could actually hurt her), she munched down on the bodies that had never been claimed, and she did her best to try to sustain a diet of stray cats when there was nothing human to eat. She learned new names such as Greg Lestrade the good meaning police officer who always tried to find more about her whenever he visited, probably feeling sorry for the mousy girl who lived among the dead. She didn’t mind him, he wasn’t a major annoyance, and she made a point to watch his mannerisms to pick up any new human skills she might have missed. She saw him cry once, sobbing on his desk, drunk.

She made herself cry that night as practice. Tears came after three attempts. They were red as blood.

She never cried after that not even as an experiment. Blood stained faces were from her past, not her future.

 

 

***

 

 

She met Sherlock Holmes and was fascinated.

He was everything she tried not to be; brilliant, remarkable looking and witty. He walked into a room with the purpose to suck all its attention to him like he was the sun. Molly made it a point to rid herself of such attentions. He was cruel, not on purpose, but for a moment his sharp tongue made Molly believe something she hadn’t in years. That perhaps that she wasn’t alone, that she had another one of her kind to rely on. Someone to help her navigate the thin line that was a monster masquerading as a human.

She was proved wrong within minutes. He smelled human, he bleed, his heart beat steadily and sure. He recited her fake history within minutes, a sneer on his face as he pointed out all the flaws and mishaps of her past.

The main thing he got wrong was the cats. He assumed she owned one, not that she ate them for a midnight snack. Molly considered it an easy mistake.

She was more than willing to take his taunts if it meant studying the most interesting human she had ever met.

 

 

***

 

 

She doesn’t love him.

It was easy to see how one could reach that assumption; she did make it a point to try to spend time with him. From an objective point of view she was exhibiting all the signs of human with a crush, rather than a monster will a science project.

She didn’t hate him either. Somewhere in the shell of her body she could sometimes almost feel a rush of affection for the man, whenever he did something particularly bright. Like the affection for a pet, she supposed.

He was so like her, the marble man, a regular statue. She felt sorry (when could she start feeling sorry, she would wonder later) for him.

She had an excuse for being trapped in the blankness rationalism. He didn’t. He had to always be like that.

After all, who would throw away what she had always wanted like it was a burden?

 

 

***

 

 

Everything was normal for a few years. Sherlock was Sherlock, Lestrade was occasionally lost on his own cases, and a good deal of tissue samples that went to the morgue got ‘lost’ in the process. Molly’s case study became nothing more than a slight curiosity, long convinced that he was just a man with a bright brain and a broken soul.

The John Watson came around and Molly’s world was thrown upside down.

 

 

***

 

 

He was what she always wanted to be; human.

He was smart, kind, brave and loyal. He threw himself in front of others without knowing them, earnest in his attempt to help. He would bandage a wound without any questions. He always had a smile. And for some reason he latched onto Sherlock like she had years prior.

Except this time, Sherlock didn’t throw him off. In fact he took to John’s company like he had never taken to hers, a smile appearing on the man’s face that was earnest.

She was convinced the man was playing John; he needed something from him, something Molly couldn’t provide. A moral compass? No, she faked having one well enough. A partner? He showed no interest in either sex (she had changed her form to a man one day just to test that theory and was proven wrong once more.) A friend? But Sherlock Holmes didn’t have friends.

At least, none he would admit of.

 

 

***

 

 

Molly met Jim and decided to pity the man by going out for tea (if she was going to keep up the image of her being invisible, she would have to interact with people sometimes).

After five minutes of talking to the man, she saw it; his emotions were the same as hers. Fake. An act that was plastered on by years of having to blend in.

So she dug, peeled back the layers behind Jim Moriarty, and discovered a center even blacker than hers. A man who decided to kill a stray cat on her window ledge for fun and thought she didn’t notice. A man who was more than a monster than Molly had ever been. A man who actually enraged her to her very bones, made her want to burn him to his bones to keep his darkness from spreading. She wasn’t sure how to take that. Should she be shocked that perhaps the monster was becoming human, or horrified that a human could be such a monster.

 

 

***

 

 

He blew up a little old lady.

For once Molly didn’t have the heart to eat the remains. Which begged the question; when did she get one?

 

 

***

 

 

She watched Sherlock become human right before her eyes.

She saw as he started to laugh more, as he started to feel more, as he started to smile at bad jokes. She noticed his courtesies to Ms. Hudson, his effort to work with other officers, his patience with Lestrade (which was little but a massive improvement over none at all).  She noticed as he mourned a woman with no face. She felt a kiss to her cheek, one for warm alive cheeks, and a wish of happiness.

She saw John mold him without even trying and hoped the same could happen to her.

Or that it had already.

 

 

***

 

 

Jim Moriarty came back in a flash, a bright mess of explosions and flame and it took all Molly’s efforts not to seek him out and have him for dinner.

He preyed on Sherlock like she used to prey on her victims, toying them into their own traps before reveling the grand plan. She offered her help as an afterthought, not that he would ever expect it, and silently began creating her own plan to wipe the only other monster she knew off the face of the Earth.

She didn’t expect Sherlock to come to her for help. She didn’t expect him to honestly want it. And when he told her his plan, a plan that could work if only by a fraction of a chance, she decided she was going to stick to her word.

 Even if it meant exposing herself.

 

 

***

 

 

Molly hung up on John, his voice screaming over the dial. Jim lied behind her in a pool of his own sins. Sherlock was knocked out, his clothes stolen, not set to wake up until she came back. The impression was easy, the shape shifting into the detective was child’s play, the flaunting was almost natural, and the coat was lovely.

The goodbye wasn’t.

She wondered who she was doing this for. Not herself; Sherlock was no longer her personal project. She had beat the villain. If a few souls died, it would just be three more on her tally.

Except those three souls had lit a spark of humanity in a once cold man. And perhaps they could do it for other’s too. Other’s like Molly. And while it was a slim hope, hopes were the only human thing Molly had truly been able to latch onto..

Molly, smiled, throwing her phone to the side, and jumped.

It was about time to change her face anyway. She might as well go out in style.

 


End file.
